African Diaspora: Literature and Culture

Catalog description

This course offers an interdisciplinary introduction to the African Diaspora, incorporating texts from Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe. Beginning with colonization in Africa and representations of the Middle Passage, the course covers historical topics such as enslavement and the plantation system, abolition movements, migration within and out of the Caribbean, resistance movements, the Harlem Renaissance, and independence struggles. As we study the Atlantic world and globalization across several centuries, we will examine cultural syncretism, commodity culture rooted in the Triangle Trade, and creative endeavors in literature and the arts (painting and sculpture, film, music, dance, theatre).